Window Treatment Serving Lockerbie Square

Local Window Treatment Experience in Lockerbie Square

1830s cottages, 1980s lofts, and some houses that arrived later than the ground

Restoration in the 1960s and 1970s did something here that changes how you measure. Period buildings were moved in from elsewhere to fill vacant lots, so a house in Lockerbie Square may not have started here. Its fabric can be 140 years old while its foundation is 55. A structure that's been lifted and moved has usually racked in the process, which means its openings can be out of square in ways that don't match how the building was originally put together. You can't reason from era to condition on a relocated house. You have to measure what's actually in front of you and accept that the diagonals may tell a strange story.

The other half of the stock arrived in the 1980s. The Indianapolis Glove Company conversion of 1984 was the city's first industrial to residential loft project, and Real Silk Hosiery Mills followed in 1986. Those buildings brought very large multi light steel and timber industrial openings in solid masonry walls into a neighborhood of small frame cottages. Lots are small nineteenth century urban parcels on a compact grid bounded by Michigan, Davidson, New York and New Jersey streets. The poet James Whitcomb Riley lived at 528 Lockerbie Street from 1893 until 1916, and that house is now the museum most visitors come to see.

Twelve foot openings and eight foot cottages, a hundred yards apart

Mounting depth runs in opposite directions inside one district. The factory conversions have masonry walls with deep reveals, which is the most generous inside mount depth anywhere in this part of the city and makes a recessed cassette or a side channel genuinely practical. The cottages are the reverse: modest frame jambs with applied casing and very little depth behind the stop. On the relocated houses, add the possibility that an opening was altered during the move. We take three widths, three heights and a diagonal at every opening here, and on the moved houses we take the diagonal twice.

Light behaves unusually too. The district is a tight rectangle on the downtown grid so fronts face the four cardinal directions, but the cobblestone streets and the very narrow rights of way mean the buildings sit close together and shade each other for much of the day. That's a different condition from a suburban lot with sky on all sides, and it changes what an openness factor does. A 5 percent fabric in a room that's already shaded by the building opposite can leave you with less usable daylight than you expected, so we look at the actual room at the actual hour before specifying.

What we specify most in Lockerbie Square

The 15 percent year on year move in median sale price is the strongest of any neighborhood we track here, and it changes how people think about spending. What it shouldn't change is the order of operations. On a loft unit with four openings twelve feet tall, one product decision carries the whole room and it's worth getting the tube, the fabric weight and the control method right. On a cottage with fourteen small openings the money goes into count rather than into any single unit. National figures put motorized product at roughly $300 to $1,500 a window installed, and shutters $175 to $800.

Getting around Lockerbie Square

The district sits immediately east of the downtown Mile Square and immediately south of Chatham Arch, bounded by Michigan, Davidson, New York and New Jersey streets. People here walk to Massachusetts Avenue for restaurants and pick up the Cultural Trail at the edge of the neighborhood. The cobblestone streets are a contributing feature of the district in their own right and they're the first thing anyone mentions about the place. The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home at 528 Lockerbie Street anchors the south side, and the two loft buildings, the Lockerbie Glove Factory and Real Silk Hosiery Mills, anchor the industrial edge.

The People's Club, the commission and the boundary

The Lockerbie Square People's Club is a neighborhood organization rather than a mandatory homeowners association, and it holds no architectural control over your property. The regulator is IHPC, and this was the very first district it reviewed, back in 1968. Under IC 36-7-11.1-9(a) a certificate of appropriateness is required before constructing an exterior architectural structure or feature in a historic area, or altering an exterior or designated interior feature. A market description of this neighborhood puts the practical version plainly: exterior modifications require city preservation commission approval. Interior blinds, shades and drapery aren't reached in the ordinary case. Exterior awnings and exterior solar shades are. The complication unique to Lockerbie is the boundary itself, because part of the National Register area sits outside local designation, so confirm your address with IHPC rather than reasoning from the neighborhood name.

Window Treatment Services in Lockerbie Square

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